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What would you do if, one decade into your career, you suddenly saw your latest release named album of the year by one of the world’s most influential music websites? If you’re Karin Dreijer Andersson, formerly singer with ‘90s pop hopes Honey Is Cool and now one half of The Knife, the answer is to take a couple of years off and return as a solo artist under a new ... Read more in Amazon's Fever Ray Store

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This is haunting, evocative stuff. Karin Dreijer Andersson digitally manipulates her voice throughout the album to sound sluggish and weary, high and low-pitched, but occasionally as on 'When I Grow Up', her real and strikingly beautiful voice pierces through the murk and establishes an innovative use of the voice as instrument.

The lyrics are abstract as though they are constructed dream-like, and the line 'We talk about love, we talk about dishwasher tablets, illness and we dream about heaven' in the song 'Seven' becomes something deeply profound and tragic.

Initially the songs blend together but subsequent listens reveal layers of complexity perhaps disguised by the mid-tempo pace of the album. Unlike The Knife's more danceable pulsing beats from 'Silent Shout', this is slower, more meditative, but ultimately just as eerie and starved of emotion. If anything the cold and hollow synths and percussion here betray a sense of sadness and a search for something tangibly human. 'Dry and Dusty' ends with the line 'And I long for every moment' which to me is as emotionally telling and relatable as it is foreboding and isolating.

I didn't feel disturbed by this music as much as I felt comforted, because the detachment on display tells me there's not just 'happy' or 'depressing' music, there's a whole spectrum of emotions present in these ten tracks that express much more than you would expect. This is best summed up by 'Keep The Streets Empty For Me' and it's final line, 'Uncover our heads and reveal our souls', and here Dreijer Andersson does just that.

Fever Ray have came with a incredible sound, some between electronic and ethnic, with several multi-percussion sounds in an excellent arrangement (where it sounds are particular) but it doesn't sound complex, the songs take you to a unknown and fantastic world and create a introspective atmosphere. Fever Ray (Karin) have great vocal performances that is memorable, sometimes with her pure voice, others with your vocoder voice. But it's great to see here those amazing videos, they are equally strange and fantastics... I really have wanted that and it's a great surprise this Special edition with DVD and 2 bonus tracks! Really great and I encourage those who wants a true travel through of mystic and fantastic world of Fever Ray.

Fever Ray does not make music. They make dark, eerie electronic soundscapes that hum and buzz like a chorale of ghosts, filled with the twisting vocals of Karin Dreijer Andersson. So don't expect an album that in any way resembles Andersson's work with the Knife -- because the only thing they have in common are some catchy beats.

It opens with a low, blurry sound like a steel heartbeat, and Andersson singing in two voices -- one is a high-pitched, Emiliana-Torrini-like voice, and the other is a dark, metallic voice. "If I Had A Heart" is profoundly weird and unsettling, but it also has a hypnotic quality that leaves you desperately wanting to hear more.

The songs that follow are not quite as entrancing, but they are in the same haunted vein -- ghostly pop melodies with meandering vocals, dark bubbling soundscapes, Asian-flavoured electrobeats, ethereal washes of dark ambient music, robotic club songs, and nightmarishly bleak excursions into dark, grimy corners of your mind (there's just something

"Fever Ray" is not the sort of pop music you hear in clubs and malls -- it is weird, twisted, unsettling and sometimes downright sinister. And I think that's what makes it so addictive. Karin Dreijer Andersson's music has a haunting quality from beginning to end, as if you're listening to a band of electronica-loving ghosts.

And her musical skills are no less compelling -- black spiderwebs of danceable electronic beats and delicate, darkling soundscapes that always seem to be going where you would never expect. The music sputters, grinds, soars, twists and bubbles whenever you don't expect it to. And the entire thing seems to be bathed in an eerie, shimmering halo.

The first song by Fever Ray I ever heard was, coincidentally, the first song on the album: "If I Had a Heart". It was a kind of music I had never heard before, and I was entranced. The video, which is included on a DVD in this special edition, marries perfectly with the music: eerie tribal masks, an abandoned house filled with dead people, a boat gliding across a foggy pool. Then there's the vocals that seem to echo from a dark hole in a forest of dead trees, achieved through Karin Dreijer Andersson's voice being lowered to a husk, androgynous pitch. Perhaps I seem a little too verbose in my adoration, but normal adjectives such as "good" and "amazing" cannot live up to Fever Ray's shadowy might.

This undercurrent of darkness runs through the entire album, even in songs such as "Seven" and "I'm Not Done" that seem more upbeat, and this is probably due to the lyrics: "I'm Not Done", for example, opens with the words "So, I lost my head a while ago..." The songs either build up to a beautiful bombardment of sound or simply fade into silence. My current favourite on the album has to be "When I Grow Up" (the video of which, on a side note, has over 1 million views on Youtube) because, try as I might, I simply cannot get Karin's witchy, siren voice out of my head. People sometimes compare her music to shamanism or say that it has an almost pagan atmosphere to it; at first I was not so sure, but after a few listens you can't help but feel that there's some kind of magic being worked. This is the kind of music that, unlike a lot of modern stuff, embeds itself into your psyche.

I would try and recommend other artists similar to Fever Ray, but I can honestly say that I still haven't found any other kind of music that sounds remotely as bewitching.Read more ›